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Episode 42: Lost and Broken: A Tale of Resilience and Healing

• ALIDA HERNANDEZ • Episode 42

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Episode#42 - Lost and Broken: A Tale of Resilience and Healing


Ever felt overwhelmed by anxiety or chronic pain? You're not alone. Join us as we journey with Congressman Adam Smith, who has personally wrestled with these invisible adversaries. In a raw and insightful conversation, he recounts his struggle and the steps he took towards healing and recovery, documented in his memoir 'Lost and Broken'. It's a powerful narrative that not only shines light on Adam's perseverance but also sparks an essential conversation about mental health and chronic pain.

As the discussion unfolds, we tackle the often-ignored topic of mental health stigma, especially in men. From Adam's transformational encounter with meditation to the integral role of confronting unresolved childhood issues, we cover it all. What's more? We dive into the crucial aspect of mindset change and stress management, underlining how mindfulness can be a potent tool in altering the way we perceive and respond to life's stresses.

In our final segment, we delve into the power of motivation and its role in overcoming physical and mental health challenges. Adam shares how his journey of recovery was fueled by motivation and the unwavering belief in his capacity to heal. Here's where we address the elephant in the room - the fear of seeking help and how it often hinders the path to wellness. So, tune in, soak in the wisdom and remember, you're not alone. Together, we can navigate through life's challenges and emerge victorious. There's help, there's hope, and there's healing.

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Speaker 1:

Is this thing on? Welcome to Rebooted the Podcast. I'm your host, Elita Hernandez. Come join me weekly to hear about my journey from recovery to healing after having a stroke and other life challenges. So let's get talking. Hi everybody, it's Elita Hernandez. Rebooted the Podcast and Simultaneous Soupy on Western Magazine as well, and I'm honored here today to be with Congressman Adam Smith. Good morning, Congressman. How are you today? Can you hear me well?

Speaker 2:

I am great. Good morning, how are you?

Speaker 1:

I'm great, I'm great. So I saw that you come out with a memoir Lost and Broken and it just caught my attention, I guess by the title and especially because we're going through so much since 2020 with mental issues, and that's one thing that I feel that we don't talk enough about. There's a lot of other things they talk about on the news, but not about mental health and the struggles that we go through, so let's talk about you. How did you start this journey and what was the trigger that happened?

Speaker 2:

Well, I went through what started in 2013 with about uncontrollable anxiety. I mean, I'd always been a high stress person and I had about a depression when I was in my 20s just briefly four or five months, and then an attack of anxiety back in 2005,. All of which I got through without really thinking about much. But in 2013, just an uncontrollable amount of anxiety came over me. That was different. Well, it was the same as it was in 2005, but it was different than normal. I didn't know what to do about it.

Speaker 2:

So I went through a series of psychiatrists, psychologists, trying to figure out what was going on, medications, all of that and then, about a year after that, I developed chronic pain in my hips and back. Which gosh. I wound up doing three hip surgeries, two total replacements, and even after those surgeries I was just in worsening shape to the point where I was in pretty much constant pain and unable to sit, stand and again battle through a whole bunch of different medications. So basically, over the course of six years, I tried to figure that out. Going back into my history, I had knee surgery when I was a kid and then, mentally, I was adopted. I had some family issues and trying to figure out. How does all that, how do I sort all of that out, to heal my body and mind.

Speaker 2:

And during the course of that, as I document in the book, I went to over 100 different healthcare providers of one kind or another trying to figure this out. So the memoir sort of explains that journey and ultimately I got to a good place. I found a psychologist who did help me. I found a muscle activation therapist who taught me how my body works. So I wrote the memoir at first just to sort of get it fresh in my mind what happened In the military. They refer to it as an after-action report, if you will, to help you understand it. But then, as I was telling the story, as you alluded to, this is something that millions of people in this country go through in some combination. So I felt writing the book, given my position as a member of Congress, would help start that conversation, or not started, help that conversation overall, to hopefully help people in this country and our healthcare system overall figure out better how to help people facing chronic pain or mental illness.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I see it's a big issue. I've seen people in the street and since we I'm in Florida, I'm in Fort Lauderdale, florida, so the homeless issue is not aggressive like in other states. But you do see some people in the street and most of them that I see have some form of mental issue or some form of depression. I mean, it's some form of depression because they either using up substance or they're just. You know, they're in the street. I don't know what to do.

Speaker 1:

And I was looking up statistics so they say that our depression levels since 2020 have increased about 25% in the United States and we have like that the United States has like the highest level of mental health issues and looking at like 15 million Americans suffering with depression. You know our suicide rate has gone up, drug overdoses you know so and what you're talking about just briefly. Then you talked about a lot of people have gone through similar things. You know family issues, abandonment issues. You know that things that that trigger us from our child, that people don't even realize, that affect us as an adult.

Speaker 2:

Well, speaking from a public policy standpoint, I honestly feel you know there's a ton of challenges out there that we're facing. I think the core of you know 90% of all of them does come back down to mental health. You mentioned homelessness and little substance abuse has become a huge problem. You simply can't function as well as a human being when you're experiencing these things. And if we could treat the underlying mental health issues the depression, the anxiety upfront, that would help with all of these other issues and we just we were a little bit lost in this country in terms of figuring out how to deal with it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, as really sad, because I remember as a kid we used to have they used to be state hospitals for mental health and then I'm not sure the history of it. You would know more, maybe, than me. Yeah, when the state hospitals closed due to, I think, there was abuse and some other conditions, I don't know what it was.

Speaker 2:

Well, the history of it is this. The history is that, you know, for years institutions were what we did, and a lot of times institutions were okay we don't know how to deal with this person we're going to institutionalize them. Okay, and without question, in the 60s and 70s and frankly it's the same with our criminal justice system we became over-reliant on locking people up, whether it was for mental health conditions or through our criminal justice system, and that basically took a lot of lives and ruined them. You know, and a lot of people noticed this, they wanted better in a different system. So that, I think, was perfectly logical and the idea was well, we should do more community based care, we should do more rehabilitation.

Speaker 2:

But there were two sort of flaws with that as the policy was implemented. First of all, that we never built the community based care. We don't have the systems of, you know, smaller community based treatment facilities. There just isn't the volume. And the second problem with that is some people do need to be institutionalized and, by the way, that is a very controversial sentence for me to utter. There's a lot of people who totally disagree with that. I just think they're wrong. I think there are some problems that are so severe that it requires that institutionalization.

Speaker 2:

And then the second big piece of the controversy here is who makes the decision? Because what we've shifted towards is the idea that the individual in crisis should have greater control over those decisions and to some degree in certain instances that can make sense. But if you have someone who is suffering from severe mental illness, severe abuse of drugs, they might not be in a position to make that decision. So but we've become very reluctant to have the state or government make that decision and, as a consequence, it's very hard to involuntarily commit people to get the mental health treatment or drug treatment.

Speaker 2:

And we've seen that problem explode across the country when combined with the fact that, like I said, we have insufficient treatment facilities. In your average community, seattle when I represent part of Seattle, I live in a suburb just outside of there they have a major problem with this. And it's so expensive in the Seattle area that a lot of your traditional, you know, residential treatment facilities, which would be, you know, your 10, 15 beds in a group home kind of setting, they can't afford to make that work. They can't afford the property in order to set it up, you know, given the cost of real estate versus you know what they would have to spend to provide adequate care for people. So we don't have the institutions, we don't have the community based care and we've got people you know out there with desperate problems, not getting any help.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's a sad situation. I don't know where it's going to go or how we're going to help people, because you know some people land up in the prison system, you know in jail due to mental health, because you know they're irate in the street and the cops can't go do a psychological assessment in the middle of the street, right? So a lot of people land up there too. So it's just really it's a really sad thing. But so, going back to you, how, when you before you did you start doing the memoir in the process of your journey or when you got the epiphany like ah, aha moment, no, Essentially, the timeline was March of 2013,.

Speaker 2:

The anxiety hits me. I got a, found a psychologist, didn't work out, found a whole bunch of things, and finally I found a psychologist who did, in fact, help me. I found him in late 2015. It took about three years. He told me right up front what the problem was, but I didn't know exactly what he was talking about and I was stubbornly resistant to following the solution. Then I found a muscle activation therapist in April of 2018 who really finally explained to me how my body worked and why my problem wasn't so much a hip problem as it was that my muscles weren't working the way they were supposed to. Because, well, in gosh 1982, I had knee surgery. I had a knee problem when I was a kid playing sports and I never rehabbed it. My right leg got significantly weaker than my left and my whole body just started slowly. Well, took about 30 years. Twisted out of shape. We got my muscles going again.

Speaker 2:

By early-mid-2019, I was coming out of it. April 2019, I finally got off the last of the five or six different drugs that I'd been taking for a while. By the end of 2019, I was feeling human again, if you will. I thought, okay, what happened here? It was pretty fresh in my mind. Well, I'm an excessively logical person, so throughout that entire process, I had been writing and writing and writing. Okay, what's going on? Okay, I saw this person. They said that it did that. It did that. There's a huge array of information. I was like, well, let's try to make sense of it. At that point, I didn't start writing the book until after I felt better. Then, of course, the pandemic hit, so I had a little bit more time on my hands. I actually wrote it in 2020.

Speaker 2:

The other piece of this that's important talking we talked earlier about severe mental illness the larger problem is with just people struggling. They can function. They're not wandering around on the streets. They don't necessarily give in to severe drug abuse, but they still have anxiety and depression that is causing them pain on a day in and day out basis. What are the basics of mental health that we should all pay attention to? That's what I learned through the psychotherapy that I went through and the examination of the issues involved. I think the other piece of this is to give us a baseline of mental health that applies to all of us. Think about how does your mind work? What should you be thinking about in order to put yourself in a more peaceful place? That's what psychotherapy did for me over the course of, like I said, about three and a half years.

Speaker 1:

All right. Well, the psychotherapy I know there are different forms of it. I just interviewed this woman who does functional psychotherapy, which I thought was very good because it's combining that holistic side, which I love more natural form, and looking at a person as an individual, because everybody is different, the circumstances are different. We can't categorize. Sometimes we're categorized okay, mental health is one straight line, but it's not because what I went through and what you went through are different. Also, I want to talk about as a man, because this is another thing that I find that is not discussed. Most women were very vocal and will talk about it, but men usually do not. There's a stigma, I think, in society anyway, just to go get help therapy. What do you say to those men out there to help them in that situation?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, there's two big aspects of that. First of all, yes, I think it is a bigger problem for men, but it's a problem for women as well. In society in general, you don't want to be perceived as being weak is the biggest thing. If you have a problem, you should be able to get through it. I think this applies to men and women equally. Now, on the physical side, there is a little bit of a stigma there too. If you're unable to physically do what you need to do, there can be a bit of an issue. But people understand that better. If you break your legs skiing well, okay, you had a skiing accident You're going to be in a cast, or you're going to be walking on crutches for a while. You're not going to be as active. A lot of people don't want to be in that position, but it's better understood as a society. As a society, we tend to think.

Speaker 2:

On the mental health side this is the way I thought about it. There's this line either you're normal or you're crazy. You definitely want to stay on the normal side of that line. The second it's like you don't want to believe it. You don't want to say gosh, if I go over here, then I don't know who I am or how to get treatment. Society will view me differently because of it. I think men to some extent do have a problem with that because mentally they're supposed to be strong and that's the perception. Again, I think this definitely crosses gender lines. Yes, when I first developed this, when the anxiety hit me and it's different than just normal stress anxiety is an uncontrolled 24 seven feeling of existential fear that doesn't really link to anything specifically. It's just there. I didn't want people to know absolutely the case because I felt if they knew they would think that I was unpredictable, undependable In my job as a member of Congress. I might well lose that job. The second big piece of it that I think is a little bit more gender specific is what you alluded to.

Speaker 2:

One of the three or four key things to having solid mental health is to be honest with yourself about what you're anxious about, what you like, what you don't like, what's going well in your life I think we and what's not going well in your life. I think we frequently try to cover that up. Maybe you're in a relationship that you just you can't get out of. You kid yourself that you're happy about it when you're really not, or something that happened to you years ago, that you either, on the one hand, you feel like you were unfairly treated and never got any justice for it and you've sort of buried it, but it's always made you angry on a sub level. On the other hand, maybe you've done something that you're not proud of when you were younger and you never adequately atoned for it internally, or what you have to be honest about that.

Speaker 2:

I do think there's a culture women, more often than men, tend to talk to each other about this. If you just keep that bottled up inside now, maybe you can talk to yourself and you can be honest with yourself. But it's a heck of a lot easier if you've got people who you can openly talk to about it, because if you keep it buried and you don't honestly address it, that is one of the big things that is going to make you more anxious or more depressed than you otherwise would be is suppressing issues that truly do matter to you, acting like I don't care, it's all fine, but it's really not. Now you have to work towards what's the word resilience in this.

Speaker 2:

I think part of the problem that we have with honestly addressing those issues is there are a lot of people that are very skeptical of this type of psychotherapy and discussion that it becomes an all-purpose excuse for everything that you don't want to do in the world. That's not the case. You need to talk about these things so that you can become more resilient and actually be more productive in life, so that these things aren't dragging you down. Yes, you have to be honest and open about what you're facing. That's one of, like I said, the three or four big things that I figured out about how you deal with mental health. In my case, it was my adoption, my upbringing, how the family I grew up with didn't really work out well, my very complicated feelings about that. That I had never really dealt with. But we all have different issues. You just have to make sure that you're honest about them.

Speaker 1:

Yes, and not let it go to the point of when it gets to substance abuse, because a lot of times then they start going to get depression pills and then those pills don't work and you get something else. I mean, I've had anxiety too. I used to have panic attacks and they were. I thought I was having a heart attack the first time. I was like what is going on? I couldn't breathe, I was like I didn't know what to do and I started drinking. I started doing I'll have a little screwdriver, and then that happened. One wasn't enough. So then I realized hold on a second. What's going on? Something's not right. Why do I need to keep drinking to get rid of this feeling? No, I'm masking something else.

Speaker 2:

So Well, and that's you know. You basically try to drug it into submission. Exactly, you try to drug it, you don't think about it, which misses the point. It's the fact that you're not thinking about it that's causing the problem in the first place. You have to be open and honest about it and address whatever it is you're feeling.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, it's taken me a long time years and learning every day.

Speaker 1:

I still learn now, so every day learning more stuff from different people just from your experience right, my experience, other people's experiences, and that's why I love doing this show you know, to get that message out there and to help other people, because I know a lot of people are struggling out there and I've said it before, please reach out to you know, get the book, read other people's experiences and also reach out and get help. There's a lot of help out there. In every city there's different. You know therapy centers, you know psychologists, you know and that's another key that's sorry to interrupt.

Speaker 2:

That's another key part of the message. And, ultimately, if I you know, if I could only get one message out there around this whole issue, it's what you just said help exists, you can get better. And I think there's a lot of people who don't really quite believe that and the sort of two reasons. One was sort of where I was coming from, you know, certainly. You know I was born in the mid 60s, so 60s, 70s and 80s.

Speaker 2:

There was sort of this general feeling that you know, therapy never really solved anything. Right, you know this notion and that was my thought. It's like, since when has a psychiatrist ever made anyone better? It seems to me, and everything I've seen, that basically all you do is you go see him for the rest of your life and nothing really ever changes. That was my perception. In fact I use this joke in the book that the satirical magazine the Onion, if anyone's ever heard of that, had a headline that said psychiatrist actually cures somebody. All right, that was. You know, that's what I thought about it.

Speaker 2:

But then the so that sort of modern, sort of the popular idea is what are they gonna do? How are they ever going to solve anything? And then I think the second thing is the belief that if you admit to a mental health problem and you seek treatment, you're just sort of never gonna come out of it. That is just and that's simply not true. There are ways, dude, there are treatments that are available that will make you better. You can figure out how your mind works so that you can deal with the stresses of life better than you do. There are techniques and therapies and help out there. That's going to happen. It's not just a place where you go to talk about your problems to no particular end. There actually are therapies and treatments that can help you better deal with the stress in your life.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly. So that's what we want to give out, that message to everybody out there Don't stay alone in this. Depression is real, anxiety is real. You know, the pandemic brought in a whole bunch of other problems with people that were already facing all these issues, and I still see it now. I see it in my friends. Some people are still afraid to go out. Some people are still wearing masks. It's three years Like you're harming yourself at this point now. You know you have to. You know I worry about those people because you can see them now that they're just afraid to go out or be around people I mean, and you know other people are fine. You know I do a lot of events, so there's a lot of parties going on. So I'm happy people there are the other side that a lot of people started to go out, enjoy life, having birthdays, having weddings, you know, and the important part, about this is something that someone said to me way back in 2013, when I was first dealing with my anxiety.

Speaker 2:

A psychologist that I knew said that it's not the amount of stress in your life, it's how you process it, and at the time she said that to me, I didn't believe it. Okay, because my entire approach when the stuff would hit me was to think that, okay, obviously I've taken on too much. That's the problem. Okay, it's true, I can't handle this. You know, I'm stressed about my kids, I'm stressed about my jobs. How do I take things out of my life? Okay, but Certainly, that is an issue you will certainly. You know, the more stressed you have in life, more difficult it is. But the real issue is how do you deal with stressful events? And when you mentioned the pandemic and how different people have dealt with it, you know, if you have mental insecurities that you haven't dealt with, you're not gonna be able to deal with it. Years after the pandemic is over, you're still gonna be afraid of going out because you're not processing it in a logical way, because there are issues that you have not properly dealt with and how you view stress so you can build your capacity to handle stress and that's sort of one of the second big lessons. You know, I've had a lot of people well, my son can be a relatively high stress person as well and we've had this conversation and when he's upset about something and I'm walking him through it and he'll say to me frequently I can't change the way I feel, all right, yes, you can. Okay, and that would be the second big lesson, because I think there's that feeling, an emotion hits me. Okay, I'm getting ready to go outside, but, oh my gosh, the pandemic's out there and it snowballs into this feeling that is so incredibly real, all right, that you think there's nothing I can do about it. But there is. And this is where cognitive behavioral therapy can come in is to teach you to you have to walk through. Okay, why are you feeling that way? What's going on? How are you thinking about it? I have this story I like to tell.

Speaker 2:

Takes a little while, but when I was first running for Congress in 1996, highly competitive race I was running against a Republican incumbent. He spent a lot of money. I spent a lot of money, fur flying all over the place. The weekend before the election I went out doorbelling in one of the neighborhoods and somebody for my opponent had come through right before me and put a leaflet on the door. So every door I walked up to there was this leaflet basically saying what a terrible, awful, horrible person Adam Smith was. Okay, and as I'm walking literally I felt like, a everybody is reading this. B everybody is believing it and C I'm gonna lose the election because of it.

Speaker 2:

And that feeling was unbelievably real, okay, 100% real, and I knew on some level that it was complete nonsense. All right, it's one brochure on 150 doorsteps. We've spent millions of dollars. At this point, the idea that one brochure on 150 doorsteps was gonna decide my election was completely wrong. But I felt it and I believed it and it really took a lot of effort back then to sort of think through it logically. But you can do that. You can change how you perceive events. Now it takes therapy, it takes understanding, but that is another big way that you can help. Process stress is to figure out how your mind is taking you down a road that is not accurate and it is generating more fear than it should.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and that's that movie reel that you make in your brain. And my husband says that the other day he's like oh my gosh, I can't stop the movie in my brain. Like he was worried about something and then he started to snowballed and he just made like he made a sequel, you know what I mean. Like he just continued.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely Well. The other thing and this is where meditation actually helped me and there's layers and layers and layers of meditation and I I went round and around on meditation always found it very frustrating. I used to joke that I'm stressed out because I can't find time to meditate. You know, and look, there's a layer of meditation where, as you can practice and practice, and practice for years and years and years, people can get to the point where, yes, you really can, you know, not quite become a Buddhist monk, but basically fear. And I was like I don't have years to do this. I got kids, I got a job, I got a wife, I got things I got to do. Like you're telling me it's gonna take me like 20 years or two hours a day, you don't need to do that. What meditation ultimately wound up helping me and there were a couple of different, you know, meditation sites that delivered this message is you can meditate at any point during the day, and basically what it means.

Speaker 2:

I do it sometimes in the shower, brushing my teeth while I'm on a walk. Just go a couple of minutes without chasing any of the thoughts that come into your head. The language that is used is just notice it okay. So for two or three minutes, things are gonna occur to you. It's not. You're not gonna shut off all of your thinking. You're not gonna shut off all of your senses, the sounds and the smells and everything and the thoughts that are gonna come into you, but don't follow any of them. Just notice it and move on. Okay, and it's really important practice because that's what can help you with that movie that your husband was deciding. You don't have to watch the whole thing. Okay, you can see it and go. Okay, I noticed that in my head. I'm gonna try to explain it. It's going to hit me and I'm going to move on, and that really helps you to process all the stuff that's coming at you. If you do that practice and you don't, like I said, you don't have to do 20 minutes twice a day or.

Speaker 2:

Right right, right, just let your brain occasionally go. I'm not shutting it off, I'm just not gonna go chasing everything, and that can really help you relax.

Speaker 1:

Well, I'm happy you mentioned meditation, because that's exactly what he's doing now. We're going through this journey now and we both do meditation and he has learned on his own. He's taking it. In the beginning he was very resistant to understanding what meditation was and what do I need it. And now when he starts getting that, that movie starts going in his brain. He takes even 10 minutes. He just goes alone. He'll put the headset on. There's a lot of stuff on YouTube for meditation. You can put sounds. There's a lot of different things out there puts that on and he just goes to another zone, just download the movie, go race it. Let's move on. So he's learned to hit that, to stop the trigger.

Speaker 1:

And the whole thing is about mind. It's your mind, your thinking. I never understood it. We all have a brain, we have a mind, but we don't understand really the capacity that we have as a human being. We have so much capacity to heal. Your body will heal, but stress stress is such a dynamic word because it's a killer Home stress, work, stress, being a perfectionist, whatever you're doing things everything your whole life, driving traffic right you tense up your body, you talk about how your body was, that you had your knee, you didn't have therapy for your knee.

Speaker 1:

And then, with all the anxiety, too, that affects your body, it affects you physically At least I found I did. I had a stroke six years ago and that was my breaking point of wow, I'm not doing things right, something is not right here, and I had to change my mind, the way I think, and that's when I learned how much the mind controls the body. Because I had lost, I had semi paralysis and thank God I am healed and I'm good again. But I did acupuncture, chinese herbs, meditation, all these new things to get back to, to get to a state that I'm happy with myself now.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no, and I think it's incredibly important thing that you said there is the capacity of the mind and the body to heal, because that's sort of the second problem with, as I see it, sort of the modern take on mental health. You know the money it's, it's sort of searching for the trauma in your life, which is good. That's part of how you have to sort of get to a mental place, but then you have to understand that you can heal, you can get better. You know, too much of what I've seen of modern discussions of mental health is Let me figure out why I'm dysfunctional, okay, and that's important, certainly all right, but it has. This is very fine line between then using that as an excuse Basically to be dysfunctional, all right, as opposed to I figure out the why, so that I can fix it and get better. All right, and and and you really are Incredibly resilient. Do what you said about the ability of the mind, the body, to heal, because that you know, I start my book off.

Speaker 2:

You know, in 2016, after my third hip surgery, like two months afterwards, and I wasn't getting better, all right, I'm taking benzota, aphemines, I'm taking oxycodone, two or three other drugs. My body isn't getting better. The anxiety is as high as it's ever been and I thought I'm what was I at that point? I'm 50 years old. Okay, I'm 50 years old. My body is officially broken down, my mind. There's no coming back from this. I mean that that was honestly my thought. You know, when I'm 25, 26, my knee hurts whatever I'll exercise. But now I'm almost 50, going on 51. There's no coming back from this. That was honestly my thought, but I did, even at that age. The ability of the mind and the body to heal should not be Underestimated.

Speaker 2:

You can get better. The purpose of therapy is not just to figure out why you're screwed up Throughout, how you get better. And let me just emphasize here I don't mean you're going to be perfect, and also People are different. Okay, some problems are more severe than others. You know some. You can hear you. I'm not saying you can get perfect. I am saying that no matter who you are, no matter what your circumstances are, you can get better. How much better is going to depend on a variety of different factors, but you have to believe that there is a path to get better, because it's absolutely true. The mind and the body have an unbelievable Capacited heal. We just need to sort of tune into that better.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, and it's. It's the whole body is Learning that. It's the body, mind, soul and spirit. So it's four cards you have to. You have to dress everything and that was the biggest thing.

Speaker 1:

Once you get and it was great what you said because it's not finding out your diagnosis. I people are too too stuck on that and Somebody I know said they went to the doctor and they got a diagnosis and they're very upset about it because they didn't like the verbiage. You know, like a label, I have this, you know, and and the person's like what am I supposed to do now? I was like no, don't label yourself. I never say you know, I have this, I have that disease, have this disease. No, I'm healed. I, in my mind, I'm healing from whatever it is. I don't have it. So you know it's like it's again. It's about that thinking right. So if they find out you have an imbalance, physical balance or whatever you can address it.

Speaker 1:

But a lot of the stuff that we go through is it's so Subconscious stuff, stuff won't like you said, from chill childhood, things that we don't even remember, things when you don't realize that are triggering us. It could be 30 years down the line. Oh, something. Something triggers you and you're like why? Why is that triggering me? And it's learning about the subconscious and holding yourself. At least I find myself. You can't hold other people responsible for your condition.

Speaker 2:

Yeah so well and actually this is something long before I went into therapy and had the uncontrolled anxiety. I had a lot of frustration Growing up. Now, you know in retrospect, I was a dot. I didn't know I was adopted, my parents never told me I had problems in my family, all kinds of different issues going on, but I had this just incredible internal frustration. I was not happy, you know, growing up. And I started drinking when I was 15. Yeah, just, it was something to do and something to sort of take my mind off where I was at in the world.

Speaker 2:

And I remember, in my Teenage years I spent a lot of time feeling persecuted, okay, but one thing or another. And finally, when I was 19 years old, the freshman in college, you know, in the midst of one of those feelings, I said, yeah, I'm gonna go back to my childhood. Those feelings I said, you know what? I do not want to figure out an excuse for why I'm not happy. I want to be happy, okay, I want to get to the life that I want. So I'm gonna stop all of this. It's unfair that this happened to me. It's unfair that that happened to me. I can't believe that, you know, and I'm gonna go okay, I'm gonna figure this out, I'm gonna figure out what I want to do and how to get there.

Speaker 2:

And and I think that's a great sort of template for an approach to mental and physical health. You know, you don't go to get a diagnosis so that you can feel comfortable in your misery. Okay, you go to get a diagnosis so you can figure out how to get better. And and that's hard because sometimes, you know, you really do kind of want, there's a party that just wants a solid excuse, okay, a solid excuse to give up. You know, because it's so hard.

Speaker 2:

I mean, you know, if you're Thinking, oh, there's something I could do, and I'm just not figuring it out is not a terribly comfortable feeling, but it can be a motivating feeling to get you down the path to figure out how you're going to get better. And that's ultimately what sort of Saved me, if you will, was as bad as I felt and all that. I just never lost that baseline determination I'm gonna figure, so I'm gonna figure this out, you know. And I think we need to have that motivation and again tied back to the idea that you can get better. There are options out there if you can, if you can figure out what they are and generate the Capacity to a to address them.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly, exactly it's. I think a lot of it's it's fear. You know, a lot of us we're. We're fearful of what we know and sometimes what we don't know and we don't want to find out. Like you need to repress memories, bad things that happens to you in life. And and it's second, it's taking me my whole life, you know, to understand that too. You know Things that you've gone through that effect your the way you act, the way you think, the way you do things. But but yes, there's help out there. Our message is Please get help out there, reach out to somebody. You know a therapist. There's a lot of therapy out there.

Speaker 1:

Now we have the ability, thank goodness, when we were young, when I was young, growing up I was born in the 60s too we didn't have these cell phones and we didn't have technology. So I nowadays I I get a little frustrated with people because I'm like you have everything in your fingertips. Your phone is a computer One. You know, when I first started, if you remember I I worked on the first IBM PC, okay, and I, in 1982, that you know, the hard drive was as big as our screen that we're on, okay, and it was like this little, you know, like it stored like 10 documents and we were whole happy, you know. So now you have this ability to look on this phone.

Speaker 1:

There's so many apps out there for mental health there's map there's. There's apps for a sobriety with support groups there's, there's. I mean there's so much out here now. So people need to just, you know, get on there, be determined. You can heal physically, mentally and have a better life. So just reach out to somebody out there and and and get Congressman Adam Smith's book on lost and broken, which is on Amazon and I'll have all the links on here. One site published at the podcast After schubert giv, so many ways, or anjung, yeah, that's gonna make for you know piękBS, except the TV. You know天 White.

Speaker 2:

Well, thank you, I appreciate the chance to discuss this and I think that's as you can tell just from having that conversation, and one of the things that's been remarkable in this process is so many people that I've known in one capacity or another 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, sometimes 40 years. As this comes out, as I write this book, they're like, yeah, I've had terrible anxiety in my life and I've known these people. I've never knew it. So it helps start the dialogue and then we can learn from each other on how to get better. So it's been remarkable to have the opportunity to hear all those stories.

Speaker 1:

That's awesome. And then you had your support of your family, your wife, your children and they saw you go through this process. So, yeah, it must be interesting to have people that you work with and people that your friends that didn't know that you went through all this and now they're like Adam, what happened? How come you say anything? What do you mean? You went through all this stuff. Oh, my gosh right, everybody's like yeah.

Speaker 2:

I have had many, many people reach out to me with it pretty much exactly that.

Speaker 1:

That that's it, so yes, but yeah, see, and that's the thing, so many of us are. So we're suffering in silence. We suffer in silence to our friends and our family. We put the face. You know, it's like the commercials. You have to put the face on your smiley Everything's good. You're not going to get your clothes, as you're not.

Speaker 2:

Well, and I think that's also. You know. You mentioned modern technology and as well. On the downsides to modern technology, though, is you can create a picture, and this is sort of the fear of missing out thing that you talk about, that the people talk about psychology and formal. You feel it makes you feel when someone you see all these pictures and all these images of other people and and they look like they've got this great life, they're so happy, they're like, oh, I think he's going well, what's wrong with me? That's just a picture. Okay, that's just an image. That's not really what's going on. All right, I think that's part of it.

Speaker 2:

I remember I made this observation when I was raising, you know, my children. You see all the family pictures, and everybody Nobody ever takes a picture when your kids throwing up at three o'clock in the morning and you haven't slept in days, you know and you and you and your spouse are screaming at each other about who's not doing enough to help the baby. Okay, so so you also have to recognize that life is not as perfect as it is presented to you in the media world, and I guess you know. So that helps you realize that you are real. There's nothing weird about you A lot of people who are putting up these very, very positive pictures. They're dealing with some of the same stuff you were dealing with. It's perfectly normal and perfectly fixable.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, exactly. So. That's why I'm always transparent. I talk about you know who I am, what I go through and the struggles, and I interview people like you to talk about these natural things that we all go through and that we all share similarity. It doesn't matter where you live, where you come from, you know your background, ethnicity. We all go through very similar things in life and there's really I mean there's tons of books out there, but I always, when I first had my kids, I said we need a manual, but I need a real manual, you know what I mean.

Speaker 1:

Like I remember back when I had the kids in the nineties, I was like you know, when I got home with the baby I'm like now, what do I do?

Speaker 1:

You know you're young, you have a child you're born to like, you're raised to okay, you grow up, you go to school, you get a job, you marry and so on. You know you do the family right. So it was hard. I got home with a newborn baby. I don't know what I was supposed to do, like it was real right. You look at the baby and you're like, oh, my goodness, it's almost the same thing. You look at your fears, your anxiety and you're looking at that child Like now I have a responsibility. So now, what do I do?

Speaker 2:

Well, and that's what you need to see Support. It's like you know there are a lot of books out there now. Yeah, now what do you expect? And the one thing that I said that I learned about being a parent is there's really you can do all that, but there's no preparing for it. Past a certain point, okay, and I'm thinking of the Mike Tyson line that's gotten a lot of play here recently about everyone's got a plan until I get punched in the face and it's like you can have this great plan but then all of a sudden there's the baby and you don't know what's wrong and trying to figure out. And that's why you know having support and you've got to learn to go. You have to be adaptable. I guess is the best that I would say. It's good to study, it's good to have a plan, but also understand that it is the nature of life that it will surprise you and you will have to adjust.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's to talk about surprise, that's true. Yeah, just makes us stronger, right.

Speaker 2:

It does. It does If you think about it the right way, if you think about it as a learning experience and not some sort of a failure on your part, it can absolutely make you stronger.

Speaker 1:

Oh yeah, oh yes. I've gone, I've hit rock bottom and come back and I look at my life now and say I'm just grateful. I just one thing I do. I wake up every day grateful. I'm grateful to be alive, grateful for my family I still have my mother with me at 85 years old and so I'm very grateful for my life and able to speak to you and speak to other people out there, and hopefully we impact somebody with this message. So that's all we want to do is help another person out there.

Speaker 2:

That is my hope, without question.

Speaker 1:

So I appreciate you and your time and the wonderful conversation and I have a copy of your book. I'm going to go through it. I have the digital copy. I can look through it and share it to other people out there so they can get it also on Amazon.

Speaker 2:

Thank you very much. Nice meeting you and I really enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker 1:

All right, thank you. Thank you, so bye everybody. Leader Hernandez rebooted the podcast. I'm going to stop this recording. Thank you for joining us today. Don't forget to follow us on social media at Rebooted the Podcast to learn about each episode's guests and topics. This is your host, alita Hernandez. See you next Tuesday.

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